(Exodus 7:1-5, Nehemiah 9:9-21; Hebrews 5:11-6:12)

So a couple times now, the book of Hebrews has quoted Psalm 110 and the line, “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” You might be wondering what that’s all about. Most likely, so were the people to whom this book was addressed. As such, you might have expected the author to move on and explain himself, because the Melchizedek reference isn’t obvious by any means; it’s going to take some unpacking, and it’s clearly important to where the author is going. But he doesn’t do that; instead, he gives them another warning. This is the fourth so far, but it’s the first of the two big ones in this book, and it’s fairly complex in its argument, so we need to unpack it carefully; there’s a lot that it’s easy to miss.

The key thing to remember is what the author has just been arguing, in the passage we read last week: Christ has fulfilled the core purpose of the law, he has completed in full, once and for all, the work that the priests and the sacrificial system could only do partially and temporarily, and so he has replaced the priests and their sacrifices. He is the final and greatest high priest who has offered the final sacrifice; nothing else is necessary, and nothing else accomplishes anything. The priests can continue offering their sacrifices if they want to, but those sacrifices are empty, meaningless, unheeded by God and outside his will—as indeed any human religious activities that are not centered on Christ are empty, meaningless, unheeded by God and outside his will. That may be the way things always used to be done, but it’s all served its purpose, and has now outlived it; God is no longer in it, and to the extent that the old sacrificial system now stands opposed to the worship of his Son, he’s actively opposed to it, and to all who maintain it.

This is, of course, a hard thing to hear; after all, this is an epistle to the Hebrews, to Jewish Christians who surely loved and valued their heritage and everything that went along with it. No doubt they understood the author’s point, at least to some degree; the question was, were they willing to accept all its implications? Were they willing to move on from their heritage, to accept that the law had fulfilled its purpose and the sacrificial system was no longer necessary? And in particular, were they willing to do so if it meant standing up to those who refused to accept that fact?

It seems clear that they were not willing; hence the author’s complaint in the end of chapter 5. “You’re going to have a hard time understanding this,” he tells them, “because your minds have become sluggish. You ought to be teaching this to others yourselves, but instead you’re making me go over the basics all over again. You’re refusing to act your age, you’re refusing to be mature—you’re acting as if you don’t understand all this, as if you still need to be treated as spiritual babies.” It’s not that they hadn’t been taught, it’s not that they didn’t know enough to know what was right, or what they were supposed to be doing; but they were sluggish, they didn’t want to actually do it, because they didn’t like the next steps they were supposed to take. They didn’t want to take the risk of faith, they didn’t want their friends who were still Jews turning against them; they had faced some persecution for Christ in the past, but if they bought in completely to what Hebrews is saying, they’d have a lot more to deal with, and they didn’t want that.

That’s why the author wasn’t able to just start off talking about Jesus as our great high priest, and why he can’t just plow right on and teach them about Melchizedek; it’s why he had to build up to that point with his other arguments, and why at every stage of his argument—including this one—he’s felt the need to offer a warning, to make sure his audience is taking him seriously and listening closely to what he’s trying to tell them. Clearly, though, he’s had enough of laying the groundwork, enough of talking about the basics; and in fact, he says, therefore, let’s press on to talk about the high priesthood of Christ. Why therefore? Because the problem isn’t that these Jewish Christians don’t understand this stuff. They understand it just fine. They just think they can get away with not committing to it, not living it out; they think they can keep one foot in the gospel and one foot in their old world—which in their case happens to be the world of Judaism and the Jewish law—and they’ll be just fine. In response, Hebrews sets out to show them how wrong they are, and why.

Now, the biggest part of that is coming beginning in chapter 7, where the author does exactly what he says he’s going to do and teaches them in detail about the high-priestly work of Jesus; when we get there, we’ll take several weeks to explore that, because he’s not kidding when he says it’s hard to explain. We’ll get there, and it’s worth it, but it does take some effort. First, though, he reminds them what they’re called to—“repentance from dead works and faith in God”—and lays out the consequences of turning away from Christ and that calling. Those consequences are severe; nothing less than salvation is at stake. It’s easy to slip into the mindset represented by the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, who once wrote, “I love to sin. God loves to forgive sin. Really, this world is admirably arranged.” The truth is very different. It is not that God loves to forgive sin; rather, he loves us and so he paid a horrendous price in the sacrifice of his Son in order that we might be forgiven. To sin casually is to take his forgiveness lightly, and to do that is to take the sacrifice of Christ lightly; and that is profoundly serious, and profoundly wrong, and not something God will simply brush off.

Now, it’s important to recognize that Hebrews here isn’t just talking about sin. There have been those who have tried to argue from this passage that any sin after conversion is unforgivable, and that’s just not the point here; this passage won’t support that, nor would that square with the rest of the New Testament. Rather, we’re talking about a very specific thing, one which is quite unfashionable to talk about these days: the sin of apostasy. This is the sin of those who are a part of the church—who have heard the gospel, who have seen its goodness and experienced its power, who have participated in its communion—and then have wilfully turned their back on it and chosen another way. Such people, Hebrews says, have deliberately chosen to crucify Christ all over again and to put him to public shame, and so for them, any return to repentance is impossible.

Now, does that merely mean it’s humanly impossible, or is Hebrews saying this is even impossible for God? Honestly, I don’t know. On the one hand, Jesus says, “With God, all things are possible.” On the other, Jesus also calls blasphemy against the Holy Spirit the unforgivable sin. We’re in one of those areas where Scripture doesn’t really give us a nice neat conclusion tied up in a white satin ribbon. But the argument here is clear, and it does parallel Jesus’ statement about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit: if you reject the only means by which you may be saved, and the only way in which you can possibly repent, then you have nowhere else to go. Christ’s sacrifice was once for all, and nothing else is coming along to offer the same opportunity—if you decisively reject that, then you have locked yourself in a room with no windows and welded the door shut behind you, and there is no way out. There is no way but the One who is the Way, and if you turn your back on him, you have no way to go. Whatever else, this is certainly impossible by any sort of human effort or human choice.

There are those who have been arguing of late that our denomination is apostate; if you follow the news stories, you know why. For my part, I say it isn’t, for two reasons. One, I don’t believe a denomination, a bureaucratic and corporate structure, can be apostate, because it’s a thing. People are sinners, and commit sins, and we use many, many things to help us do so, but the things themselves are not guilty of sin. Two, it must also be said that what certain people, or certain collections of people, do is neither necessarily representative nor necessarily determinative of the denomination as a whole. General Assembly may well vote to reject the plain testimony of the word of God in any number of areas, but they aren’t the ones who decide; the presbyteries do, and so far, the presby-teries have swatted them down every time. What GA does gets the headlines, but it’s what the presbyteries do with it that matters, and that remains to be seen. So no, the Presbyterian Church (USA) isn’t apostate. But are we led by apostates? Are we led by people who have turned aside from the gospel to follow their own gods with their own laws? Ultimately, only God can judge that; but in some cases, there’s reason for concern. Which obviously means we must watch closely what they do and go carefully lest we be judged for following them, and believe me, we of the Session are doing exactly that.

The broader question that arises from this passage is, does Hebrews teach that you can lose your salvation? The answer is, if it does, it also teaches that you can only lose it once, and it’s gone forever—there’s no falling away and coming back and falling away and coming back—but I don’t believe that’s what’s in view here, because that isn’t where Hebrews goes with this. Rather, we see the author go on to express confidence that his readers haven’t fallen away from Christ, and aren’t going to, because God is faithful and their faith is real; like the field in verse 7, they have already produced real fruit. In Christ, they will escape the danger they face, the author has no doubt, because God won’t let go of them; but he still wants them to understand that danger and take it very seriously.

The truth is, we affirm the perseverance of the saints, that salvation is a work of God that we cannot undo, and that thus it’s impossible to “lose” our salvation; but nowhere does the Bible promise the perseverance of everyone we think is a Christian. Who are the saints? The saints are those who persevere. It’s why Paul stresses running to win, crossing the finish line, finishing well, fighting the fight all the way to the end; we can’t judge people’s hearts from the outside—we can barely judge our own. There are those who seem to run well for a while, but then they drop out, and in so doing, reveal that we misjudged them. It’s like Jesus says in the parable of the sower—it’s not just that the seed springs up that matters, it’s whether it can thrive despite the weeds, and whether the soil is deep enough to sustain the growth through the heat of the summer. And so Hebrews tells its audience, and us, not to get too impressed with ourselves, and not to take ourselves for granted; God is faithful, but we still need to keep running, to keep pressing on, to stay in the race, because we haven’t crossed the finish line yet.

The thing that makes this tricky is that it isn’t a matter of just working harder; this doesn’t boil down to “just grit your teeth and keep going.” That’s living by law; that is, ironically enough, one of the temptations we have to resist. In truth, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of folks who turn their backs on the church aren’t really turning their backs on the gospel, they’re turning their backs on that sort of “just do it” legalism; they aren’t rejecting Christ but a counterfeit, though that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to get them to listen to the gospel. Following Christ, putting our faith in him alone, produces good works, but those good works are not the ultimate point, and our goal is not to get those good works by any means necessary; good works done in our own strength are like costume jewelry—they may glitter and sparkle on first appearance, but apply any pressure and they break. What God calls us to is, in truth, harder: to continue to live by faith, to continue to put our trust in the grace of God and the saving work of Christ, to continue to put to death our own egos and their demands for credit and attention, to continue to learn and accept humility and acknowledge that we are not enough, only Jesus is enough. It means setting aside the demands of our selves with our agendas and our plans, and letting ourselves be filled instead with the mind and the Spirit of Christ, that he would fill us and dwell in us, that he would mark out our way and direct our paths.

(Deuteronomy 33:8-10, Psalm 110:1-4; Hebrews 4:14-5:10)

As the author of Hebrews has been building his case for the supremacy of Christ, he’s been gradually zeroing in on his key point. All the way along, he’s had his eye on the Jewish law; as we know, one of the main attacks on the early church was from those who insisted that even after Jesus, it was still necessary to keep the whole law in order to please God, and the author is concerned that his hearers might give in to that attack. He doesn’t want them to go back to putting their faith in the law—which is to say, in their own ability to keep the law—and so he’s writing to strengthen their conviction that not only do they need Jesus, they need only Jesus, with nothing else mixed in.

Having shown Jesus to be superior to the angels who delivered the law, to all other authorities including the law, and to the Sabbath which is the law’s greatest earthly blessing, he now arrives at his central point, one he’ll focus on (from a couple different angles) through the middle section of the book: Jesus replaces the core of the law. He’s not merely superior to it as an authority, he’s superior to it in its very essence; what the law could never fully accomplish, he accomplished. The Old Testament law can never be understood in the same way again, because Jesus has fulfilled the purpose for which it was created. It’s still the word of God, we still need to understand it and learn from it, but we don’t live under it anymore; we live under grace, in Christ.

This may sound strange, because we normally think of law as something which is designed to compel and control behavior, to make people do certain things and not do other things; you can find a great many churches that preach the Old Testament that way. For that matter, you can find a great many churches that preach the New Testament that way. That’s a very common form of religion, because it’s what we human beings keep trying to collapse our relationship with God down to—if I do enough good things and avoid enough bad things, God will be pleased with me and will give me what I want. That’s a very common form of religion, but it isn’t the gospel, and it isn’t what following Christ is about; and in fact, it isn’t what the Old Testament is about either, or ever was about. The core purpose of the Old Testament law was to provide salvation from sin to the people of God by providing a means by which the price for their sin could be paid and the holiness of God could be satisfied. That means was imperfect, and could only be temporary, but it was the main reason for which the law existed.

This can be hard for us to understand, because as I’ve said before, we Protestants don’t understand priests. We don’t really know who they are, or what they do, or even what the whole priesthood thing is about—the whole idea is unfamiliar to us. One reason for this, of course, is that we aren’t Catholic (though a few of us used to be), and so we don’t have priests. We know the Catholic church across town has a priest, but for most of us, that’s just external knowledge, not a matter of experience; we know that the pastor there has the title “priest” and is addressed as “Father,” but most of us don’t really know what that means, because it’s never been a meaningful part of our lives.

That being the case, though, it needs to be said that even that would only get you so far, because Catholics don’t understand priests the same way the Old Testament did either. There are similarities, but also some very real and significant differences, and especially the whole sacrificial system—to my knowledge, no Catholic priest has ever sacrificed so much as a pigeon, let alone a cow. As such, even understanding the Catholic priesthood is of limited value in understanding the Old Testament priesthood.

To understand the central focus of this book and its argument, we need to address that, because Hebrews puts considerable effort into showing that Christ is the new and greatest and final high priest, that he has replaced the entire human priesthood and the whole sacrificial system which they served; to get a handle on why the author does that and what he’s really trying to prove, we need at least a basic grasp on what the priests did and why, and how the system worked.

To get the essence of that, look at our passage from Deuteronomy—this is from Moses’ blessing on the tribe of Levi, from which the priests came; look specifically at verse 10, and you can see the two parts of the priest’s work, and the two directions in which that work moved. First, “They teach Jacob your ordinances, and Israel your law.” This is the work of representing God to Israel, of teaching them the will and the ways of God and proclaiming God’s word to them, and this part of the job, we’re familiar with.

But then look at the second half of that verse: “they place incense before you, and whole burnt offerings on your altar.” This is the work of representing Israel before God. The people of Israel couldn’t go directly to God to ask forgiveness, because their sin got in the way; they had to go through the priests. They would bring their offerings of animals and grain to the priests and the priests would then offer them to God on behalf of the people. Every sacrifice was a prayer, and it was a prayer you couldn’t pray yourself; the priests had to pray it for you. They were the only ones who were allowed to do so. They were sort of professional holy people—you might even call them professional pray-ers.

Now, this was the system the Israelites had, and it was better than anything anybody else had; it enabled them, however imperfectly, to pray, and to come to know and serve the one true God, and that’s no small thing. Still, it wasn’t enough. The most it could do was address the symptoms—the outward sinful acts, and not even all of them, and certainly not the sinful attitudes and desires in the heart that were the true disease; and even for the symptoms, all it could offer was an endless series of temporary fixes, not any kind of cure. It was like dialysis for someone with kidney disease, or insulin for a severe diabetic—it was enough to keep going, but the real problem remained. And of course, the priests themselves were sinful, too, and had to offer sacrifices for themselves as well as for everyone else; that wasn’t all bad, because it meant they could understand the sins and failings of those who came to offer sacrifices for sin, but it meant that their work was inevitably imperfect, just as the sacrifices they offered were by nature limited. Something more was needed.

That something more came in Jesus; but it’s important we understand that it was something more, not something different. It’s easy to lose track of that, since the whole sacrificial system is so foreign to our experience. You all can pray for yourselves and for each other, by yourselves or together. When you sin against God, you don’t have to come to me and have me pray for you in order for you to be forgiven—you can do that yourself. When you have a need, I’m certainly glad to pray for you, but God will take care of you whether you ask me to pray or not—his action isn’t dependent on me one way or the other. I’m not a priest, I’m just a pastor. Or rather, I am a priest, but only in the same sense as each of you is a priest, that all of us who belong to Jesus are called to be priests to each other in the name of Christ. We’re called to intercede for one another, to speak truth to each other, to encourage one another, and so on. But at the same time, our relationship to God doesn’t run through someone else, it’s direct, one-to-one.

That does not mean, however, that we don’t still have a high priest, or need a high priest, and it doesn’t change the fact that a sacrifice was necessary to make that possible. Nor, indeed, does it change the fact that we need a high priest who is one of us, fully human, and thus fully able to understand the struggles we face; or that to finally solve the problem of human sin, we also needed a high priest who was more than human, someone who could offer a perfect sacrifice, and one which was sufficient to pay the price for all our sin, not just some of it. Whether we knew it or not, all those things were necessary. Jesus didn’t change any of that. He simply fulfilled the requirements.

Jesus, Hebrews says, is our great high priest, the highest priest, who has done everything necessary for our salvation; nothing and no one else can add anything to his accomplishment. He fulfilled every requirement. He knows what it is to be human, because he is one of us; he lived as one of us in this world, facing all our struggles and all our temptations. He knows our desires and our fears, from the inside out, and you can be very sure that the Devil hit him with every temptation possible. Indeed, as we noted a couple weeks ago, Jesus was tempted far, far worse than any of us ever are, because at the point where we give in to temptation, he kept right on resisting. Whatever we’re dealing with, Jesus understands; when we go to him to ask forgiveness, he knows what we’re talking about, because he’s been there. At the same time, though, because he never gave in to fear or desire, he was able to offer a perfect sacrifice, untainted by sin; and because he was God, he was able to offer a sacrifice of infinite value, sufficient once for all to bring full and permanent salvation to all who trust in him.

Therefore, Hebrews says, “Let us approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” We no longer need human priests to present our prayers to God, because we have Jesus, who is himself God, to do so. We pray, and the Holy Spirit carries our prayers to him, and he presents them to the Father, interceding on our behalf, pleading our case for us. When we pray, we aren’t praying alone, nor are we relying on our own merits and good works, any more than the ancient Israelites were; rather, Jesus prays with us and for us. We rely on his merits and his good work on our behalf. This is why we pray in Jesus’ name; indeed, this is what it means to pray in Jesus’ name.

Which, if we really stop and think about it, should move us to awe. We’re used to it, so we don’t stop and think about it, but prayer is no small, safe, domesticated thing. Annie Dillard puts this brilliantly in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk when she writes,

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

This thing that we do—we run as children into the throne room of all creation and climb up into the lap of the King of the universe and tell him everything, in the absolute assurance that he wants us to, and he’s listening with care to everything we say; and we do so because Jesus makes it possible, because he has opened the door for us and he’s the one who lifts us up to the Father to be heard.

It’s a shame when we take that for granted, because it’s a wonderful gift; and more, because when we take it for granted, we take it less seriously, like it’s no big thing. And that’s a problem, because there are times when we need a big thing, and we know it. There are times when we’re desperately in need, or desperately afraid or worried, or when we really feel guilt and shame for our sin, and we truly need something big; if we don’t realize just how big a thing Jesus did for us, and how big a gift he gave us, then when we get to those times, we go looking for more. If we don’t really understand that our acceptance into the presence of God isn’t dependent on whether we feel worthy to be there, then on those times when we don’t feel worthy, we go looking for some way to earn our way in. And we don’t need to. We don’t need to go back to the law, we don’t need to find some way to measure up, we don’t need to add anything to what Jesus has done; what he has done is enough. Jesus is enough. There is nothing more.

(Psalm 95:6-11, Psalm 127:1-2; Hebrews 4:1-13)

Sara and I have gotten a lot of congratulations (and the occasional snarky comment) since we started telling people we’re going to have another child, and the congratulations are certainly appropriate and appreciated; I think, too, they’re a sign of health in this community, because children truly are a blessing from God, which is something our society seems to understand less and less these days. In our growing individualism and exaltation of the self, our culture more and more focuses on the inconvenience and burden that children represent, and the way in which they make you vulnerable to hurt, and misses the sheer wonder of the opportunity to love and know another person. That’s the wrong focus, and it’s an ungrateful response to the abundant goodness of God; and six months from now, when I’m trying to function on four hours’ sleep a night in three pieces, I pray you’ll remind me of that fact.

In all seriousness, the lack of rest that comes with a newborn takes a real toll on Sara and me both; I won’t call it one of the hardest things about parenting because it’s such a short-term thing, but man, you really feel it while it lasts. We need rest; our bodies need it, and so do our spirits, and if we don’t get enough, it takes its toll. Someone was telling me recently about a couple Navy friends who had tried to join the SEALs, but had washed out, for different reasons—one because he discovered a severe allergy to poison ivy, as I recall; of course, they try very hard to wash people out, and only accept those they can’t get rid of. One of the ways they do that is through extended sleep deprivation, pushing people far beyond what their bodies can really handle to see if they break. One of the stories I heard was of a prospective SEAL standing in the forest, trying to use a tree to make a long-distance phone call; lack of sleep had fogged his brain to the point that he could barely think. We need rest for our minds and bodies to function properly.

The problem is, we know this, but various things interfere. There’s strong economic pressure these days, if you have a job, to work whenever they ask—especially in businesses that can let employees go and just have others work longer hours to make up for it. People wind up working long, long days, or seven days a week, or both, because they feel they have to in order to stay employed. Others work erratic schedules with no rhythm to them, no consistent time for rest, because those are the hours they can get. I remember doing that, back when I was searching for my first call, working as a relief chaplain at our hospital; I remember times when I was there at 3, 4 in the morning. There are a lot of folks for whom work runs their lives, while rest is largely an afterthought.

This is a problem in better economic times, too, of course; the desperation isn’t quite the same, but the opportunities for economic advancement are better, and the carrot works at least as well as the stick when it comes to getting the mule to move. Someone once asked the great tycoon Andrew Carnegie how much was enough, and he replied, “One dollar more”; it’s an attitude shared by an awful lot of people. It’s easy to figure that we can rest when we just achieve the next goal, whatever that next goal may be—but if we get there, there’s always another one just up ahead, and yet another beyond that, and always one more mountain yet to climb before we can really sit down and rest.

For the world, rest is dependent on circumstances, and I don’t say that’s entirely unreasonable; true rest, after all, goes with true work—God gave us work to do just as much as he gave us time and space to rest. He gave us both because we need both to flourish. Work without rest is unbalanced, bad for the body and the spirit; but rest without work is even worse, because those who refuse to do good work do not find good rest, but only a counterfeit that sickens the soul. Those who feel they cannot do good work find their rest blighted; you can really see that in our shut-ins, which is why I often need to reassure them that their prayers matter, and we treasure them. (In the first draft of this sermon, I wrote “if nothing else, they can pray”; Sara read that, and God started convicting her that for all of us, prayer is the first and most important work he gives us. I looked at her and wondered why God hadn’t simply convicted me of that, and the answer is of course that he believes in efficiency, and this was a two-fer: he fixed my thinking, and at the same time reminded me how much I need my wife. Which I knew, but it never hurts.) Whatever the work God gives us, we need to do it for our own sake; the need for rest arises with the need to work, it isn’t an excuse to avoid work.

The problem is, though, we don’t understand what rest really is, and where we truly find it. When we think about this through an economic prism, as the world does, we essentially think of rest as a reward, something we have to earn; that misleads us in two ways. One, we get work and rest out of their proper balance—either by yielding to that way of thinking, which produces overwork, or by rebelling against it, into laziness and sloth—and two, that leads us to define rest in purely physical and material terms. Rest is a day off, a vacation, a morning to sleep in, a time to go do something fun. Which is all good and necessary for body and spirit alike, but it’s not enough. If you’ve ever had a day off where you couldn’t get your mind off work, no matter what your body was doing, or a vacation where you came back more exhausted than you left because you were frantically busy the whole time, you understand that—rest isn’t just a matter of your physical circumstances, it’s a matter of the attitude of your mind and your heart.

This is an important reality, and it points us to what Hebrews is doing here in chapter 4. The author, in the warning that concludes chapter 3, has pulled this passage from Psalm 95—God’s people rebel against him in the wilderness, refusing to trust him, and so he bars them from the Promised Land; and how is that phrased? Not, “They shall not enter my land,” but “They shall not enter my rest.” It’s an interesting statement, and the author picks up on it to argue two things. First, he notes that this is God’s rest, and like any good Jewish teacher, he goes looking in the Bible for God’s rest, which he finds in Genesis 2:2—“God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” God’s rest is the Sabbath rest, which he commanded to his people in his Law.

What does that mean? It means to do as God did, to rest from all our works. It means laying down our own efforts, letting go of our striving, taking the burden off our shoulders and setting it down. It doesn’t necessarily mean doing nothing—though there are times when that can be important—which is why it’s not supposed to be a legalistic observance, because it’s not physical inactivity that’s the main point; what matters more is the heart attitude of rest. Obviously, stepping aside from one’s job is necessary to this, but simply not going in to work is meaningless in this sense if you take your work and its worries home with you; if you’re still focused on your expenses and what you have to get done and how you’re going to pay the bills, if you’re still trying to carry your life on your back, then you aren’t experiencing God’s rest, and you have no true Sabbath.

The key here is the understanding we see in Psalm 127: what matters most isn’t what we do, but what God does. If it’s just your work, it’s going to collapse sooner or later, no matter your frantic efforts to prop it up; but if God is in it, you can leave it in his hands, and go rest, because you can trust that he can keep it going just fine without you.

Again, this is partly a matter of physical circumstances, because one of the ways God does this is by providing for us physically and financially. The promise of rest in the Exodus, after all, was entrance into the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey where making a living would be easier than most places. One of the ways we know God is building this church is that he has provided us over the years with gifts of money that have enabled us to keep going and keep doing his ministry until, as I believe, the day comes when that ministry will bear fruit and we will have the people we need to be self-sustaining, and indeed to grow the ministries he has given us. More broadly, as he gave the Promised Land to his people, so he has given us the country for whose freedom we give thanks at this time every year; our constitutional protections and our economic strength make rest much easier than someplace like Haiti, or Iran, or Zimbabwe, or North Korea. The fact that we often turn them into new and creative reasons to stress out instead doesn’t change that. Our political and economic blessings are among the ways God provides for us, and we should always be grateful for them.

That said, we need to understand what Hebrews is telling us: that’s only part of the picture. These are gifts God gives us, but we must not focus on the gifts, because they aren’t enough; we need to focus through them to the one from whom all good things come, because more than the gifts, we need the giver. As the author points out here, if Israel entering the Promised Land had been enough to fulfill God’s promise of rest, God wouldn’t have needed to keep making the promise. There’s more, and better; there’s a truer, deeper Sabbath rest than anything merely physical; and that rest is found in Jesus. Jesus, as he is superior to all other spiritual powers, as he is superior to all other authorities in heaven and on earth, as he is superior even to the Law of God, so he is superior even to the greatest earthly blessing of that Law, the Sabbath; he is the true Sabbath rest, the final fulfillment of that promise.

Why? Because Jesus gives grace, and he gives it to us to live by grace. If we’re trying to live by our own efforts, we can never truly rest, because there’s always more that we urgently need to do; there’s always one more problem coming down the pike, and one more opportunity not to miss, and one more sin we haven’t beaten, and one more area where we need to improve. If it’s just us guarding the walls, then sleep is a risk we can’t afford. But Jesus tells us, it isn’t just us; we aren’t on our own in this. We keep trying to be big enough, strong enough, smart enough, fast enough, good enough, and the burden of needing to be enough crushes us under the weight of musts and shoulds and regrets; Jesus tells us we don’t have to be enough, because he is enough for us. All we have to do is what he gives us to do, and trust him for the rest.

(Psalm 95:6-11; Hebrews 3)

As we saw last week, we’re into the second part of Hebrews’ argument for the uniqueness and supremacy of Jesus Christ. In the first part of this section, which we read last week, the author argued powerfully that Christ has authority over all creation, having been given that authority by God the Father. The world raises an objection to that, what’s usually called the problem of evil: if all the world is really subject to Jesus, why don’t we see it? Why do we still see suffering?

The author of Hebrews acknowledges that indeed we don’t see all things subject to Jesus, at least not in the obvious way; we don’t see a worldwide political regime that acknowledges his authority and seeks to rule according to his will, nor do we see a world free of senseless tragedy, devastating illness, or natural disaster. Rather, we see a world where sin often seems to have the upper hand. Hebrews doesn’t try to pretend otherwise; rather, the author contends that while we don’t see obvious signs of Jesus controlling things from on high, instead, we see Jesus suffering with us, and at work in and through our suffering for our good, and the good of others. We don’t see him reigning as king, but we do see him exercising his authority as high priest to bring about our redemption, and to set us free from our slavery to sin.

Now, as I noted, the author’s ultimate aim in this section is to establish that Jesus is a higher authority than the law. Many Jewish Christians still kept the whole Jewish law, and often they tried to force other Christians to do the same; they believed that even if you worshiped Jesus as Lord, you still needed to keep the whole law in order to be saved. The goal of the author of Hebrews is to convince his audience that this isn’t true, that they are saved through faith in Jesus Christ alone—and indeed, not only did they not need the Jewish law, but that if they put any of their faith at all in the law, they would be turning away from Jesus. As C. S. Lewis would later put it, Christ plus nothing equals everything—but Christ plus anything equals nothing. Hebrews wants to make sure we hold fast to Christ alone and so end up with everything instead of nothing.

To that end, having asserted the absolute authority of Christ over everything, the author turns to apply that by showing that Jesus is superior to Moses, through whom God gave the Old Testament law. He doesn’t in any way disparage Moses, but affirms him as a servant of God who was faithful in all God’s house, someone who is worthy of glory for doing the work God gave him to do, and doing it faithfully; Moses deserves the honor he receives, and there’s no need to diminish him. Actually, that Moses was indeed a great man of God is part of Hebrews’ point: even as great as Moses was, Jesus is greater. Come up with the greatest, most admirable, most important person you can find—it doesn’t matter who, Jesus is greater.

The argument here is simple: like Moses, Jesus was faithful to God, but Moses was only God’s servant, Jesus is God’s Son. Moses was faithful in God’s house, which is worthy of glory and honor, but Jesus is faithful over God’s house, which is worthy of far more. Moses is a servant in the house; Jesus is its builder and the one who has all authority over it, and he has been completely faithful in all that the Father has given him to do.

Then in the second half of verse 6, we get this interesting transition: Christ is faithful over God’s house, and we are his house. We’re moving away from the cosmic reality of Christ as the one who is above all the angels, who made the whole world and has authority over all of it, to focus on Christ as the one who has authority as high priest over the household of God, which is his people. There are several reasons for this shift, some of which we’ll get into as we go further into the book; in part, though, it’s part of the comparison of Jesus to Moses. Hebrews isn’t just saying that Jesus is greater than Moses because he made the world and Moses just lived in it; that wouldn’t really be to the point. Rather, Hebrews is saying something much more relevant: yes, Moses was a great leader of God’s people, but in this way, too, Jesus is greater. He’s worthy of more glory than Moses not just because of his work as creator and sustainer of the world, but because of his work here on earth.

Now, the interesting thing here is that the author actually goes on to make that argument in his warning section. You may remember, if you were here two weeks ago, my talking about the three-part sections of this book—first, the author presents an argument for the supremacy of Christ, then he applies it, and then he warns you what will happen if you turn away from Christ—and beginning in verse 7, we get the second warning of the book. Once again, he starts by quoting one of the Psalms, Psalm 95, which is a telling choice, I think. It starts by giving praise to God as Savior, then as the creator of all things and the God and King above all other powers; then it makes the transition and says, “Let us worship him specifically as our God, for we are his people.” This is the same shift we see in Hebrews. And having made it, we get this passage which the author of Hebrews quotes, which references the Exodus in warning us not to harden our hearts against God.

At first glance, it seems like a jarring change—but when you stop and think about what the psalmist is saying, it really isn’t. Israel affirmed God as the rock of its salvation—why? Because of the Exodus. The Exodus was the defining event of Israel’s history and identity; it was during the Exodus that he gave his people the Law, and it was through the Exodus that he established the corporate relationship with his people that would set the terms for their national existence from then on. And here’s the key: the Exodus was God saving his people as a people from slavery to a power which they could never have overcome, then leading them out of exile in a far country and back to the home which he had promised them and prepared for them.

Underlying this warning in Hebrews, though the author doesn’t explicitly come out and say it, is the understanding that Jesus came to lead the people of God in a new and greater Exodus. That was something God had promised through his prophets, as a consequence of the exile: though God had punished them by sending foreigners to conquer them and drag them far from home, he would raise up a leader who would bring their exile to an end and return them to Jerusalem. Those promises were fulfilled at the most basic level when Cyrus of Persia decreed that the Jews were free to go back to their own land, but there was much in them that was not fulfilled; even though they were back in Israel, the Jews were still a conquered people, and the throne of David was still vacant. Over time, they came to the conclusion that in some ways, they were still in exile, and still needed God to send his Messiah to bring about the new Exodus which he had promised long before. This, says Hebrews, is exactly what God did in Jesus.

Of course, as we’ve noted before, the problem was that it didn’t look like what people expected; it wasn’t a political victory, and it didn’t result even in political freedom for Israel, let alone a politically and militarily powerful Israel that could bring the Gentiles under the rule of God’s law. It certainly didn’t produce anything that looked like the promised messianic kingdom. So if we do not see everything subject to Jesus, then what is it we see? Hebrews answers that by saying, what we see is Jesus leading a new Exodus, not out of earthly slavery to an earthly government, but out of the far more oppressive and far deadlier spiritual slavery of all human beings to the power of sin and death.

This is a profound thing: Jesus has inaugurated God’s ultimate work of deliverance, that of all his people—now expanded to include all the peoples of the world, not just Israel—from all that has been set wrong in his creation, and all the effects of that blight. This is no mere partial solution, quick fix, or treatment of symptoms; this is the healing of the whole disease, right from the root. However, as the language of Hebrews acknowledges, it is a deliverance which is still in process. God through Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt, but they didn’t simply cross the border into their own land—he led them out into, and through, the wilderness. He took them into a period in which they had already been delivered, but their deliverance was not yet complete; they were already out of slavery, but not yet experiencing everything he had promised them. They were living in between. God had promised them a new home, he had begun the process of getting them there, but they had not yet seen it.

It’s out of that reality that the warning comes, both from the psalmist and from the author of Hebrews. God took his people out into the wilderness, and they promptly started complaining, and finally rebelled; as a consequence, he kept them there for an extra forty years, until that rebellious generation had died off. His people wouldn’t put their whole faith in him to take care of them, because they didn’t really believe that they would see the rest which he had promised them; and so God judged them, and they didn’t. Instead of focusing on God and his promises, they focused on their circumstances and difficulties, and when push came to shove, they believed in their circumstances more than in God. God said, “Go into the land, and I will give you the victory,” but their eyes said, “Those enemies are too powerful for us, we’ll lose”; they trusted their eyes over God, and refused the gift. They refused their promised salvation, out of unbelief and fear.

The concern driving the author of Hebrews is that some of his readers are being tempted to make the same mistake. We are in the wilderness, and so we do not see all things subject to Jesus; we are halfway home, in between the land of slavery and the land of promise, and all the promises Jesus has made to us are already assured, but most of them are not yet fulfilled, though we have started to see the fulfillment of many of them. The road through the wilderness is not an easy one—that’s why the Israelites kept thinking that maybe they’d be better off going back to Egypt, forgetting that slavery was even worse than the challenges of freedom; it’s easy to start to wonder sometimes if we’re really getting anywhere, and if it’s all really worth it. It’s easy to start to think that maybe that glimmer off to the left there is actually an oasis, not just another mirage.

In response, Hebrews tells us to learn from history. To those who held fast to God, he was faithful; those who trusted that God would do as he promised saw his promises fulfilled. Those who did not, did not. If we’re faithful, we can be absolutely certain that God will be faithful; but unbelief is its own punishment, because however difficult the road may be to which God calls us, it’s the only road that will get us where we need to be, and the only road he’ll help us walk.

Of course, “just have faith” and “just keep going” are both easier said than done, and sometimes by a long way; which is why we have this interesting statement in verse 13, “Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” We need one another. We need people to walk alongside us, to listen to us, to encourage us, to tell us we can make it; we need people we aren’t willing to disappoint, people we really don’t want to see us fail. It’s one of the key things that makes Alcoholics Anonymous work. If we try to go out there and just be strong, if we try to be Nike and “just do it,” we probably won’t; we’ll probably fall for lack of support, and there will be no one to help us up. But if we go together, we have the support of others to keep us from falling, and to help us get up and keep going if we fall anyway. We need each other.

And we need to encourage each other while it’s still called “today.” It’s easy for us not to do that; it’s easy for us to figure we have time, we can do it tomorrow. But you know, it’s always “today” when you actually do what needs to be done or say what needs to be said; we don’t live in “tomorrow,” we only live in “today.” If we try to hand things off to the future, when the future becomes the present, will we do them then? Or will we just kick them down the road again? And what if the future we imagine never comes? What if we actually don’t have time—what then? We don’t have tomorrow, we can’t count on it or control it; we just live in “today,” one day at a time, never knowing when this might be the last “today” we have. We only know what we can do now, and we have no assurance of any kind that we’ll ever be able to do it again; we need to take the opportunities we have while it is still called “today” to give others the encouragement they need from us, because we may never have those opportunities again—and who knows what may be lost? There are those who are gifted in this way, to whom seeing and seizing those opportunities comes naturally, and there are those of us who are much more likely to miss them; but gifted or not, this is something we’re all called to do, to actively look for chances to encourage those around us to follow Jesus, to trust him, to hold fast in their faith, in the assurance that however rough the road may be, he will bring us through the wilderness safe and sound, and into the promised land at last.

(Psalm 8, Psalm 22:22-24; Hebrews 2:5-18)

To listen to the sermon “Yet at Present” by the Rev. Scott Hoezee, to which this sermon and its author are heavily indebted—beginning from the opening line—go here.

“I read the news today—oh, boy.” So begins “A Day in the Life,” the closing track from the Sergeant Pepper’s album, one of the most influential songs the Beatles ever wrote. It’s a familiar reaction, isn’t it? On June 1, 1967, the day that album was released, someone picking up the paper might have read about civil war in Nigeria, or growing tension between Israel and its neighbors—the day before, the president of Iraq had declared, “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. . . . Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the map”; instead, on June 5, Israel would respond with a sneak attack on Egypt’s air force, beginning the Six-Day War—and of course, there was always news from Vietnam, which by 1967 always seemed to be reported as bad news regardless.

Today, Israel is still threatened, though these days Iran is the big problem, and the looming bad news is that Turkey seems to be moving that way as well; we aren’t fighting in Vietnam, but Afghanistan just passed it as the longest sustained military conflict in our history, and the prospects there don’t look good; and of course, there’s always news from the Gulf of Mexico, as a blown-out oil well a mile under the water continues to spew while BP fumbles, and our government dithers and interferes. I read the news today . . . oh, boy. Oh, boy, indeed.

In the face of this, there’s a real temptation to just—not read the news today. Pull into our bubble, figure the rest of the world can do or not, and just make the best of our own little circumstances. There’s too much suffering out there; insulate ourselves from it, as much as we can. Just don’t think about it, unless you have to. Just go through life with headphones on, as Jars of Clay put it in a recent song; a friend of ours who’s a longtime flight attendant for United has commented, somewhat sadly, that people talk a lot less on flights now—as soon as the light goes off, the headphones go on, and most of the people on the plane disappear into their own little worlds, tuning out and ignoring everyone else. After all, isn’t it safer that way? After all, if you let someone else start talking, you never know what you might hear.

A lot of churches, you’ll find that sort of attitude in worship, too. It’s most visible in contemporary churches, not because there’s anything wrong with contemporary worship—I appreciate it, just as I appreciate the hymns, and there’s some truly great songs being written these days, and some great things being done—but simply because that attitude often drives contemporary worship leaders. Crank up the volume, crank up the tempo, generate lots of energy, get everybody whipped up—it’s a proven way of attracting people, in part, I think, because it lets hurting people pretend for a while they aren’t hurting. But those who are ready to deal with their hurt, or who could be, just get run over—there’s no room for that.

This isn’t just a “contemporary” problem, though, it happens just as easily if you sing hymns; the only differences are the volume and the tempo. Just do our little bubble thing, sing songs about how great God is and how blessed we are, read happy Scriptures and say happy things, eat cookies, and go home. It’s easy to do, and again, it feels good; and again, it leaves real issues unaddressed. One of the reasons I appreciate the traditional liturgy is that it took its form during a time when the church couldn’t pretend that everything was ducky-wonderful, and so if we take it seriously, it holds us to confront and to address the realities of sin and pain; it directs us to the fact that this thing we do isn’t just for us, but is part of our response as followers of Jesus to this “lost and broken world so loved by God” in which we live.

Of course, it’s completely true that God is great beyond the limits of wonder, and good beyond the limits of joy, and that we are blessed far more than we realize or deserve, and that we do have profound reason to rejoice deeply; but to affirm that in a way which is really true and which really connects with and takes into account the sorrow of our world requires us to understand that in a different way than we often do—and here, Hebrews has something profoundly important to say.

At this point, I need to stop and acknowledge my deep debt here to one of my favorite preachers, Calvin Seminary’s Scott Hoezee, whose Worship Symposium sermon a few years ago on Hebrews 2 has permanently shaped my thinking on this passage; I think the only other person who has comparably influenced my understanding of any piece of Scripture would be Dr. Kenneth Bailey on the parables in Luke. You see, the Rev. Hoezee caught hold of something in this chapter that I hadn’t seen before, and it is, I think, what makes the whole thing turn.

As I mentioned last week, the agenda of Hebrews is to drive home that there is no one greater than Jesus, no other savior, no one who can add anything to the work he’s done, and no alternative in which or in whom we can place any real faith. First, as we saw, he compares Jesus to the angels, and shows how he is greater than any of them, or than all of them put together; this was a rebuke to those tempted to worship multiple spiritual powers, and also to those who insisted Christians must still keep the whole Jewish law, for Jewish tradition taught that the Law had actually been delivered to Moses by angels. Now, Hebrews builds from there to argue that Jesus is superior to the Law, that he is a higher authority—indeed, that he is the highest authority, having been given all authority over everything that is—though not as king, here, but as its great high priest. That’s a very important point in Hebrews, and we’ll come back to it in the weeks ahead. For now, just look what he says about it.

He starts with Psalm 8, and does something very interesting with it. Obviously, part of the reason it’s here is that phrase “son of man,” which Jesus used as a title for himself, and thus he takes this psalm as referring to Jesus—and rightly so, though some argue otherwise. The real turner, though, comes a little further on. You see, in the Hebrew, Psalm 8 says, “You made him a little lower than elohim.” If you were here when we started off in Genesis, you may remember my saying that the Hebrew word for a god is el; the dual form, which would mean two gods together, is eloah; and the plural, for three or more, is elohim. This is the word Hebrew used for talking about the gods of the nations; it’s also the word it used as one of the principal names for God. And this is the word we have here in Psalm 8, leaving ambiguity as to what exactly the psalmist means.

Now, the NIV, like a lot of translations, passes the ambiguity on. The first Greek version of the Old Testament, though, didn’t: it reads “angels,” following the common interpretation of the time that the psalmist is stressing human inferiority and insignificance. Hebrews takes that and combines it with the understanding that this psalm is referring not to people in general, but to Jesus, and comes up with this: God made the Son of Man lower than the angels for a little while, but has now crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his authority. And just to ram that home, the author doesn’t stop with the psalm, but adds: “And when he says everything, he means everything. No exceptions.”

Up to this point in Hebrews, then, we’ve had this great long soaring arc of praise to Jesus Christ. He is the radiance of the glory of God, he is the exact copy of his nature, he is the one who upholds the universe by his word, he sits at the right hand of the Majesty of the universe, he is eternal and his rule is without end, he is above every other being that exists, and he has been given full authority and power over all creation. It’s like the Hallelujah Chorus, building and building and building to that last triumphant, overpowering declaration of praise . . . and then, suddenly, there’s the pause, and just when you expect this crescendo to hit a full-throated climax, something to take your breath completely away, the author breaks off, and says quietly, “Yet at present we do not see everything subject to Jesus.”

Yet at present. As the Rev. Hoezee says, it’s a line with which every sane person in this world can agree—and if anything, an understatement. I read the news today, and did I see the world operating under the rule of Christ, acknowledging his authority? No, I saw wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and floods, starvation and terrorism, injustice and indifference, death and betrayal, and somehow encapsulating the tragic mystery of our screwed-up world, the ongoing story of a 7-year-old boy who seems to have vanished into the thinnest of air right from the hallway of his school. If you believe his stepmother anyway, and it looks like the police aren’t so sure they do. You may remember Time magazine during the Rwandan genocide of the ’90s quoting a missionary who declared, “There are no devils left in Hell. They are all in Rwanda.” Sure, there are good things, too, saints and revivals and works of light, but precious little to match the horrors we keep concocting. This is the news as we know it; as the late Rich Mullins put it, this is the world as best as we can remember it. Oh, boy, indeed; oh, heaven help us all.

No, Hebrews declares, at present, we do not see everything subject to Jesus, and all God’s people say, “No kidding.” And it’s not just out there somewhere, where so many don’t want everything subject to Jesus—we see it in our own lives, and in our families. We see people we love who desperately want someone to love and marry, and can’t find them, or desperately want children, and can’t have them; we see children turn away from Christ to go their own way, and we see marriages shattered by betrayal or starved by indifference. We see cancer run amok and infections that won’t heal, and if we’re honest when we look into our hearts, we see that the spiritual disease we fight is even worse.

Even in our own souls, we do not see everything subject to Jesus; instead, we see self-will and distrust, rebellion and pride, and the desire to want what we want when we want it. Oh, we fight those things, to be sure, they are not the whole story of our lives, and we know the Holy Spirit is at work in us . . . but they’re still there. God has placed all these things under Jesus’ authority; yet at present, most days, we don’t see it.

But. But, says the author, this is not the last word. At present, we do not see everything subject to Jesus—but: we see Jesus. We see Jesus. And who is the Jesus we see? We see the Jesus whose crown of glory is a crown of thorns, who is honored for accepting dishonor—we see the Jesus who’s been reading the same news we read, and who not only observed our deepest tragedy, but lived it. We see the Jesus whom the world trampled under its feet; indeed, Hebrews affirms, that is exactly why God has now put that same world under his feet. We do not see Jesus distant and glorious, majestic and awe-inspiring to the point of being terrifying—we see him as he was made like us in every way and bore every grief and temptation we bear.

Indeed, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, he was tempted far worse than we ever are, because we only go so long and then we break; he never broke. Satan hit him with everything he had, and Jesus took it all and stood fast under suffering far greater than anything we could survive. And of course, he didn’t survive it; his victory required that he accept suffering to the point of death, and beyond—and he accepted that suffering, and so won that victory, for us. He did it so that he could pay the penalty for our sin, a penalty beyond all our resources and abilities put together to pay; and so that in so doing, he could set us free from our slavery to sin, and bring us out from under the dominance of death, which together were a bondage we could never have escaped, no matter how hard we might try. This is the victory he won; this is how he won it; this is the Jesus we see, and no other.

And in truth, how else could it be? We keep looking for God to win victories the same way the world does—but we have plenty of politicians and plenty of generals already; is one more of them, even a better one, really going to help? Is not the Jesus we actually see, the one who experienced the sorrow and agony of our world to its shattered-glass depths, who bears its marks deep in his being—isn’t this Jesus the Savior we truly need? Everyone else who claims authority in this world does so in some way on the basis of power—whether as brutal as a military coup or as gentle as a majority of the popular vote; Jesus receives it on the basis of sacrifice and suffering. They claim it for themselves; he claims it, in a very real sense, for us.

The one to whom God made this world subject is not some distant conqueror, mighty warlord, or calculating politician; he isn’t someone who just wants everything to run smoothly with no complications, and never mind what happens to individuals in the machine. No, he’s the one who grieves as we grieve for the sister who is addicted to meth, for the brother who has just been abandoned by an unfaithful wife, for the father who has Alzheimer’s and the mother whose husband no longer remembers her, for the daughter who longs to have children and cannot, for the son who has declared his hatred of God and started wearing pink triangles and rainbows.

No, with the eyes of this world, we do not see all things subject to him, not on this tortured, fractured planet of myeloma and Alzheimer’s, terrorism and murder, deformity and death, war and betrayal; but with the eyes of faith, we can look at the cancer clinic and the dementia unit, at the battlefield and the funeral, and at every other place where people sin and people suffer—which is everywhere—and we see Jesus. Because Jesus is there, bringing reconciliation, redemption, repentance, and healing. This is the gospel, not that Jesus is striding through the world preventing the bad people from causing suffering, but that when suffering comes, he is in it with us, working through it for our good, to bring us his victory—and that he is enough. He is enough for us now; he is enough for us for always.

(Psalm 2, Psalm 110:1-4; Hebrews 1:1-2:4)

When I graduated from Hope College, up in Holland, Michigan, in 1996, I was very pleased to have gone there—and not just because that’s where I met Sara. It’s a great school, and not just academically; my professors weren’t just names and lectures, but people I knew and could depend on, from whom I learned a lot outside of class as well as in it. I grew spiritually because of the chapel program, and made many wonderful friends; and it was interesting, when we visited this past April, to find that every single professor we talked to remembered us—even the one we’d only known as the father of a friend. As pleased as I was then with my choice of college, though, I’m even prouder to be a Hope grad now; during a time when many colleges have suffered great losses economically, and when many once-Christian schools are running away from the faith as fast as they can, Hope is weathering the economic and spiritual storm amazingly well. Wonderful things are happening there, and the folks tasked to lead the ship have the right vision to see that continue and grow.

Which is probably what one should expect from a school whose symbol is the anchor. You can’t spend any time at all around Hope without seeing it—the big anchor at the old entrance to campus, the anchor on the college seal, the anchor on the school’s more informal logo. It’s all over the place—and for good reason. The school was founded in 1854 as the Holland Academy, the work of one of the great figures in the history of the Dutch community in America, the Rev. A. C. Van Raalte; and in his dedication speech, he declared, “This is my anchor of hope for this people in the future.” From that line the school would ultimately take both its name and its symbol, and a profoundly important piece of its identity.

“This is my anchor of hope.” In saying that, Rev. Van Raalte was drawing on the book of Hebrews, specifically Hebrews 6:19-20, which declares our hope in Christ to be “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul”; he wasn’t putting his faith in the institution, but in Christ. The institution of the school would be an anchor of hope because it in turn would be anchored in Christ, and only for as long as that remained true; and by the grace of God, so far, it has.

Of course, that hasn’t been without struggle or conflict; there are plenty of people who would like to see Hope anchored in something other than the historic Reformed understanding of the Christian faith. Some of them are even on the faculty, legacies of a previous administration that didn’t care about this so much. That’s really not surprising, because we all face the temptation to put our hope in something other than Christ, to find our soul anchor in anything but him; the world tells us that we can’t possibly put our faith in someone we can’t hear or see or touch, that there are far more sure and certain anchors for the soul than Jesus. Money, perhaps; a college degree, or maybe even a graduate degree; personal relationships; there are a great many things we value, and it’s easy to put our trust in them instead of in Jesus, to hope in our bank account or our marriage, our résumé or our children, instead of in Christ. It’s easy because we have some control over those (though not as much as we think we do), and we just find it easier to put our hope in our own work than in the work of someone we cannot control.

This is an age-old temptation, and we see it right here in Hebrews, because it’s the temptation the letter was written to address. We don’t know who wrote this letter, or to whom, and in fact that knowledge was lost very early on; but we can see clearly why it was written. Whoever the author or authors of this letter may have been, they had one single overriding concern: to demonstrate beyond any conceivable room for argument that Jesus Christ is superior to anyone else and anything else, that there is no one and no thing else in whom it makes any sense at all to put our faith and hope and trust. Christ alone is our soul anchor, he alone is our anchor of hope, and he’s the only anchor that will hold through the storms of life. He has no rivals; he never has.

This overriding concern, this overarching theme, is what we’re going to be focusing on for the next number of weeks as we spend time going through this book—which is a difficult book if you’re not familiar with it, because it draws heavily on the religious culture of the first-century Hebrews, which is thoroughly alien to us. Even so, the book’s main focus is very clear in our passage this morning, right from the very first verses. “In these last days, [God] has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of the Father’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.” And off the book goes for a while to talk specifically about that aspect of Christ’s superiority, that he is above all other spiritual powers.

We also see, in this passage, something about the structure of the book. Hebrews isn’t just saying all these things about Jesus so we know them, after all, but because the author wants to encourage people to put their faith in Christ and Christ alone, not in anything else, not in anything additional. With Paul’s letters, what you typically get is a long theological section and then several chapters of application, but Hebrews doesn’t work that way. Rather, what we see is a repetitive structure in three parts.

First, the author makes part of his case for the uniqueness and supremacy of Christ—in this passage, the argument that Christ is superior to angels. Then he applies that. Here, that application is quite brief, in chapter 2 verse 1: because Christ is superior to angels, and thus his message is superior to any message ever delivered by angels—which, as he reminds his hearers in verse 2, is no small thing—then we need to pay more careful attention to the message of the gospel of grace in Jesus Christ. We need to take that message seriously and respond appropriately, so that we don’t wind up drifting away and putting our faith and hope in anyone or anything else. Having said that, then comes the third part, the warning: if you ignore the only salvation God has offered, which is given through Jesus Christ alone, the only result will be ultimate and absolute disaster, with no hope of escape.

The key thing to understand here, though, is that this warning isn’t rooted in punishment—indeed, it isn’t really about punishment at all. It’s more like a sign reading “Bridge Out Ahead.” If you see a sign like that and insist on ignoring it and going around the barricades, unless there’s a cop sitting right there to stop you, you aren’t going to be punished for ignoring the sign; you simply won’t be able to get across, because there’s no bridge there to get you across. And if you insist on trying to cross it anyway, you won’t be punished for that, but you will suffer the consequences of trying to do the impossible: you’ll have an accident. That’s essentially what Hebrews is talking about in the beginning of chapter 2. It’s not that God is just waiting to punish you if you try to do things your own way—it’s that Christ is the only way, and if you put your hope in anyone or anything else, you are trying to cross the canyon where there is no bridge, and so you will inevitably fall.

But if you will hope in the Lord, he will never fail you; you may stumble, but you will not fall. The one who is the radiance of the glory of God and who upholds the universe by the word of his power is the one who upholds us, for he is the one who purified us from sin and now intercedes for us before the throne of heaven; no one and nothing else can save us, no one and nothing else could ever be enough, but he is enough, and he has done it—and he will never fail you. He is faithful who promised.